


Things Left Unsaid

by dweebulous



Category: Harry Potter - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-02
Updated: 2013-12-02
Packaged: 2018-01-03 05:35:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1066366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dweebulous/pseuds/dweebulous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Remus and Sirius find different ways of coping through the first Wizarding War.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things Left Unsaid

I. They do not talk about why Remus left.

They do not acknowledge his taut silences in the weeks before graduation, or the night in the dormitory after they'd drained the flask of fire whiskey, when he'd said "There's no place left in the world for me now," and had refused to elaborate after. They do not even talk about his absence. They have been looking for him for three weeks, but their vocabulary has shrunken to tube stops and street signs. They do not dare to say his name. 

James does not tell Sirius that he pores over The Prophet every morning. The headlines and lists of the dead. His relief flares up when he reaches the back page, but it burns out quickly, leaving a pile of ash in his stomach. Sirius does not tell James how unbearable he finds this purgatory of not-knowing. He prays for any news, good or bad. He finds no hope in ignorance. He finds no solace in their silence. It seems, in the weeks since Remus has gone, that the world has been reduced to a pencil sketch. Things have form, but they've lost their depth and color. The light rubbing of an eraser could make it all vanish.        

James is the first to break the silence. “We’ll never find him if he doesn’t want to be found.” They’re sitting in a twenty-four hour diner, watching the rain drip past the grimy front window. It’s been raining all summer so far, for the weeks they’ve been stumbling through the forgotten corners of London, plastering James’s unruly hair to his forehead and beading on the leather jacket Sirius picked up from a muggle secondhand shop. It’s rained so much, in that dreary London way, that they no longer even notice the damp.

Sirius’s throat clenches uncomfortably, and he does not answer. Just swirls a packet of sugar into his cooling grey coffee.

“He’s too good at hiding, Padfoot. He’s too good at keeping secrets.”

Sirius takes a sip of the bitter coffee, coughs into the back of his hand. He reaches for a paper napkin and shreds it methodically, leaving the strands of paper in a tidy pile in the middle of the table.

“I miss Lily, Pads. I miss my parents. I don’t want to give up on him, but we can’t search forever. It’s like when you lose your wand, maybe. You look and look, and you think it’s gone forever, and just when you stop searching it turns up.”

Sirius clears his throat, runs a hand over the stubble on his chin. He hasn’t been able to grow facial hair for very long, and it’s still a surprise whenever he cups his palm against his scratchy cheek. “I’m going to stay a bit longer,” he says into his coffee.

“C’mon, Sirius, I’m not going to leave you alone.”

“You’re not my mum, James. And it’s a good thing. You’d look terrible in her ratty old knickers.” The joke startles both of them into familiar grins, and Sirius feels a warmth spread through his chest. “Really, go. I need a little vacation. Soak up some of that infamous London sunshine, shag some muggle girl working at a sausage stand…”

James is stricken. He opens his mouth, narrows his eyes, then presses his lips shut.

“Go,” Sirius demands. “I’ll stay a few more days. I’ll come to your parent’s at the end of the week, with or without Remus.”

They both fall silent at the name. They look to the door, as if it could work as a summons. As if Remus will walk in, skinny and disheveled and with fresh scars across his face, but smiling and nodding and letting them buy him the biggest plate of eggs they can afford.

No one walks into the diner. The rain continues to fall. James stands up, claps a hand to Sirius’s shoulder and lets his fingers squeeze hard through the leather jacket for just a second too long.

They do not say goodbye.

The ding of the front door opening and closing. A sound from by the dumpster like a car backfiring. Now, Sirius is really, truly alone. Now, he can begin looking properly.

 

This is what Sirius has not told James, or anyone else.

That six months ago, while a party celebrated the spectacular loss of the Gryffindor Quidditch team, he stumbled drunkenly up to the dormitory and into Remus’s bed. And when he woke with his mouth burning with the taste of vomit and unfamiliar saliva, he’d pretended he was too drunk to remember the night before.

 

This is what he never told Remus.

He remembered everything.

So he finds the places James never thought to look— a part of London James has never even considered; a street lined with dim pubs full of men who smell of smoke and sweat. Who turn to Sirius when he walks in, leer at his dark hair he ties back with a bit of string, his pale and almost pretty face, his youth.

As soon as he walks through the door of the third pub, he knows.

The hairs on his arms stand up. He peers through the crowd of sad midday drunks, and there, at the bar—he’d recognize that slant of shoulders anywhere, that unruly tuft of fawn hair which he knows, from memory, is already graying at the temples.

Sirius walks up to the bar as if in a trance. Sits at the stool to Remus’s left, folds his hands in front of him, and does not say anything.

Remus turns slowly. His eyes are blurry as he stares Sirius up and down, but as he leans forward sharpen their focus until Sirius can feel the gaze burning straight through his skin, to his bones.

They stare at each other in silence.

Remus does not say, “What took you so long?”

Sirius does not say, “It was only a matter of time.”

 

II. They do not talk about the war.

When they lay not-quite-touching on the mattress in Remus’s apartment, they can feel the space between them fill with ghosts. They do not speak of the friends who died, or the friends that will. Sirius does not ask why Remus left, and Remus offers no explanation.

They pass a cigarettes back and forth in the bedroom, which also happens to be the sitting room, which also happens to be the kitchen. Remus has rented a tiny room with a stove, a mattress on the floor, and a pile of dusty books he’s collected the backroom of the muggle bookstore he worked at for a week before they fired him, frowning at the fresh scratches and bruises across his young face. Remus doesn’t care that the ceiling is already stained yellow from tobacco smoke. He likes the way he can feel the heat on his tongue at each inhale, and he likes the physical nature of the smoke as it swirls up to the cracking paint. He thinks of old magic, campfire oracles who burned sacrifices and read the future in ashy swirls of their offerings.

He never had much patience for divination. Still, this smoke reading appeals to him. But he doesn’t need a prophecy to tell that everything’s going to shit.

The mattress springs creak as he rolls over. Sirius closes his eyes as he inhales on his cigarette. His Adams apple bobs, and his eyelashes slant shadows down his cheeks. Remus slips a hand onto his chest, slides the fingers right through a gap between the buttons of his shirt.

Now is a language is of quiet moans, soft curses, long and drawn out exhalations. 

They are both relieved. Because as they lay, sweaty and spent, not-quite-touching on that mattress on the floor, they don’t have to talk at all.

 

III. They do not talk about how much it hurts.

In the weeks and months after they move into that tiny apartment together, they do not ever discuss the fear they both smell with their canine-sharp noses. They do not discuss the pain they feel every morning, because neither of them can define it—it’s like the seconds after sticking a bare hand under a running faucet, when the skin cannot yet tell whether the water’s ice cold or burning hot. They alternate between sharp, hot fear and freezing submergence.

It had been so easy to ignore the war while at Hogwarts. Those days felt so far away.

When Sirius kills his first Death Eater—brutally, violently, using the very spells they should have been fighting against—he does not tell Remus. He goes to their apartment and fucks him up against the sink, leaves purple bruises on his hips where his fingers pressed too tight.

Remus understands, and he doesn’t, and he says nothing.

And the next morning, he wakes early to brew a pot of strong tea in the electric kettle. He sits on the floor and does the Prophet crossword until Sirius wakes. Sirius moves to sit next to him, back against the wall, and when he pulls the dark blue mug of tea up to his nose he can smell honey. Two spoonfuls, just how Remus knows he likes it. And for a moment, the smell of that sweetness is all he needs.

Remus’s hand moves slowly over the carpet, covers Sirius’s with his own.

They do not talk about how Sirius’s fingers tremble. Sirius inclines his head to rest on Remus’s shoulders, and they synch their breaths, sitting still as the morning light angles from the single window in a rectangle across the floor.

 

IV. They do not talk about what is between them.

Their relationship is spun out of glass, something fragile and not to be believed. Some days, Sirius thinks it is the darkest part of him. Some days, he thinks it’s the only good part.

Remus is used to secrets. At least this one does not hurt him. Not yet.

 

V. They do not talk about where Remus goes each moon.

When he returns to the apartment on the next waning day, Sirius cleans his wounds but does not ask questions. Remus has only ever had women tend to him—his mother, then Madame Pomfrey—and when he first bares his scratches and gouges to Sirius his skin flushes bright red. His first instinct is to hide himself, but he is so tired and so sore, and Sirius’s hands are slow and gentle as they sooth Essence of Dittany over the lacerations.

After that first month, this becomes their ritual. Remus rips his body apart, and Sirius begins the healing. There is no more joy to the moons—no adventure through the Forbidden Forest, no stories to tell and retell in the dorm the next night—but Remus finds a calm pleasure in Sirius’s hands against skin.

A pitcher of warm water, a vial of Dittany. At the first touch of rag to wound, Remus closes his eyes.

Sirius cleans the scratches on his cheeks, smoothes the rag over the scabs across his clavicle.

The warm water drips down his bare chest. He feels a brush of lips against the bruise blooming on his collarbone, and opens his eyes.

They are men. They are soldiers. They are brave, and strong, and silent. Things are getting so bad. Things are getting worse.

But there are moments, as fleeting as the lips against the curve of his collar, that still feel sweet. Something brief, but lingering, like a breath of spring air through a cracked window, or a spoonful of honey in a mug of tea.

 

VI. They do not talk about how much Sirius drinks.

Bourbon, scotch, flasks of cheap whiskey. A glass tumbler at dinner, a pick-me-up at lunch, a glug into his tea every morning. His eyes keep sinking further into his face. He cannot sleep. He cannot look Remus in the eye.

They are apart for days, and then for weeks. The Order needs Sirius—his confidence, his recklessness. He does not write when he’s gone.

Remus leaves sometimes too, on his own accord. The apartment is so small, sometimes he swears it shrinks around him. There are days when he scrimps up a handful of sickles and rents a cheap room, for the freedom of having a pack of cigarettes a space all to himself. There are whole days he spends walking aimlessly, seeing how far he can get before his legs are too tired to keep carrying him.

In the apartment, they are careful to keep to their own sides of the mattress. Sometimes, they both lay awake, not realizing that they’re both staring at the same spot of peeling paint on the ceiling above them. And when they lay together, all the things they do not say build between them.

 

VII. There is nothing left to say.

There is only the empty apartment, the fresh graves of the Potters, the horror of a life stretching forward into oblivion. Remus feels so tired, so old. He forgets that he is only twenty one. He does not write to Sirius in Azkaban, but he composes letters in his head.

They are angry, they are vengeful, they are full of poison and spite and loneliness and desire and shame. He composes them without planning or structuring, and when each one is complete he buries it within himself and feels worse than before. 

He lessens by the years, stretched and thin like the elbows of his old jackets. He wakes up every morning. He makes tea with honey. He reads the paper. He does the crossword. He goes to work—whatever jobs he can pick up, a constant stream of menial tasks and physical labor. He comes home. He cooks eggs or cheese-on-bread. He reads a novel. He listens to the news on the radio. He goes to sleep.

He reads occasional Prophet story about Harry, and he aches with how much the photograph of the shaggy-haired boy with thick glasses looks like James.

And without ever planning or hoping, somehow, he ends up back at Hogwarts. Returning to the campus hurts, burns, stings, but he is grateful because for so long, he’s felt nothing.

And then, without ever planning or hoping, Sirius comes back to him. And the world starts to turn again. And things start making sense—not always, not entirely, but in brief, clarifying flashes of light. The first time they see each other, in the shack with the children watching, they talk in impatient bursts and fragments. There is so much to say, too much. They could talk for an eternity and never release all the words.

The next time they see each other, almost a year later, they are alone. Remus has rented a small flat with the last of his teacher’s salary, and he has purchased an old orange couch and a new electric kettle, and he has left the mattress on the floor because that always suits him just fine. And Sirius comes back one night, skeletal and dirty, hands shaking, skin sallow. He leans against the doorframe in the hallway, eyes sweeping over the front room, the open door to the bedroom, the kitchen where two mugs and a jar of honey sit on the counter next to a brewing pot of tea.

For fourteen years, they have remembered the silences. Now, they remember the noise.

All of the words they’ve ever said. Every innuendo and nuance and metaphor and riddle. Every misunderstanding, every misconception. They have not really spoken in fourteen years, but as soon as Sirius is shaking in that doorframe Remus remembers everything they’ve ever said to each other. _Good mornings_ , _good nights_. _Hellos_ and _goodbyes_ and _can I bum a cigarette_ and _let me copy that potions essay._ Rarely, very rarely, _I love you._

They fall into each other, not embracing, just leaning their prematurely old bodies against each other like they cannot stand without the support. So many things unsaid. So many things left to say.

They are together. There are things to say. But there is time, now, to unravel the twisted yarns of separation and withholding. For now, they need silence.

 -end-


End file.
